The Detonator: The Best of BOMB Magazine

At the Clinic 

We are admitted at once, of course. There is a long line, but we brush right past. We are serious, it seems, more so than others. I wink at you. You laugh. On the walls all the laughs are painted in a baroque fashion, which means as gilt dolphins. You and I despise gilt dolphins, of course. Of course we do. The man who is waiting for us has drawn up the papers. “You are prepared to do this?” “We are,” I say. “Most definitely, we are.” “At least I am,” you say. “I don’t know about this joker.” You laugh; and this time someone rings a bell to answer you. It is just the man laughing. His laugh sounds like a bell that is being rung elsewhere. “If we weren’t ready before we came,” I begin to say, but the man shakes his head sadly. He holds up a sign: NO MORE TALKING. And then it is time. He leads us to the beds, the skin of his fingers as soft as candles. It is in another room, quite far from where we were, but we don’t begrudge the distance. We are happy about the room. There are fine tall windows, which you point out, as if it matters. I lie on one pallet, you lie on the other. You take my hand and laugh again. You laugh, I laugh. We are laughing, and he injects us, and we are laughing more. It is so funny. Don’t you remember, in that place where we last were, that thing that … At some point, you become quiet, and I realize: you have died. I try to turn my head to look, but there isn’t any of that. No turning of the head. No turning of the head, no hand. The hands aren’t doing anything. They aren’t hands. The sound of the bell comes again, closer this time. Closer and closer. I was remembering something, about someone I knew. I was …

—Jesse Ball in BOMB’s latest installment of Word Choice, art is Sophie Jodoin, Small Dramas & Little Nothings, 2008

Drawing is the purest form, I mean you’re really making connections, you look at the visual information, you’ve got a pencil and a piece of paper. How do you translate that? That’s about as pure and as crucial as you can get. You know exactly where you stand, all the challenges are right there. You don’t have to invent them.

—Duncan Hannah, BOMB 4, 1982

The connection a reader seeks with a book, it seems to me, is a connection that is felt, or experienced, unconsciously.

—Donald Antrim, BOMB 58, 1997

By taking away all of the psychological handles, the moral handles or whatever, you end up with a character who’s compelled rather than motivated and that’s part of what I was trying to get at. The character really didn’t believe in anything or wasn’t really driven by anything, so this was the extreme that he was resorting to in order to have a sense of identity or have a sense of being.

—Michael McClard, BOMB 1, 1981

Life’s advantage over art is its genius for the unexpected. Just as new wrinkles in the tradition imply something unforeseeable in the life of a particular artist, so dislocations in a text or a painting can take on the look of shorthand for life itself.

—James Merrill, BOMB 36, 1991

That’s a great vice which the English and the Americans share, the belief that great works of art are available for moral purposes, for elucidation. But I never met anyone who became a better person for reading a novel. You may become a better writer but not a better person.

—Peter Ackroyd, BOMB 26, 1989

Reading is connection, and writing is connection, both intimate acts yet acts that are done alone though not lonely.

—Maureen Howard, BOMB 63, 1998

For the lonely child, the imagination is pre-eminent and more important than daily life.

—Fredric Tuten, BOMB 64, 1998

You can’t be taught some of the most crucial things that you have to understand in order to be an artist, things like learning to trust your intuition and developing a sense of your own self in your paintings. Not because of what you learn, but almost in spite of what you learn.

—Christopher Brown, BOMB 31, 1990

Europeans live this intense double life. They created, for example, the political culture of individuality, and yet they practice genocide on a scale that is unequaled in any other time or place. It’s that two-faced nature of European civilization I was trying to hint at in a person, and maybe we can only understand these things if we bring them to a personal level.

—Ian McEwan, BOMB 33, 1990